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All Rise...

In his dreams, Judge Daryl Loomis has tons of friends.

The Charge

Heal the sickness.

Opening Statement

Back in the old days of video stores, before IMDb made lists of little known
or weird films commonplace, I was on a constant search for the next big thing.
The movie with the warning about pregnant women and those with weak stomachs
needing to stay away; the one with the declaration of the countries where it's
been banned. Nowadays, we can spend five seconds doing an Internet search to
find out whether something is worth watching. Information is great and all, but
it's kind of too bad that sense of exploration and wonder is gone. Still, if you
aren't paying really close attention, you can still be taken by surprise by an
unknown movie with an eclectic cast and a bizarre plot description.
Excision is just such a movie.

Facts of the Case

Pauline (AnnaLynne McCord, 90210) is
a depressed, lonely high schooler with a surgery obsession. Her domineering
mother (Traci Lords, Blade) forgets about her
for Pauline's little sister, Grace (Ariel Winter, Modern Family), who is dying from
cystic fibrosis. Outside, Pauline is a deeply troubled misfit, but inside she is
a blood-drenched queen and she feels like, if she can only bring that out, all
her problems could be solved.

The Evidence

Excision is a hard movie to pin down. It's bloody and gross enough to
qualify as a horror film, but there aren't any scares or thrills. When it goes
for laughs, it achieves them fairly handily. When it goes for dramatic effect,
the storyline and performances are easily strong enough to handle it. So, what
kind of movie is Excision? A very interesting and strange one, that's
what kind.

It's far less driven by its plot than by it characters and situations and
the fact is that the lynchpin of the story really doesn't even come to light
until the final minutes of the film. There are some intimations of what might
happen, but I think viewers would have to stretch pretty far in order to guess
how Excision would play out. It's a testament to the skill of first time
director Richard Bates to keep the film intriguing without ever showing his
hand. He achieves this through an impressive visual style and an ability to draw
consistently good performances out of a seriously eclectic group of
performers.

The biggest surprise comes from McCord, though maybe that's a result of my
own ignorance of her. I've never seen anything she's appeared in and, judging
from her body of work, I'm not so inclined to catch up. Her work here, however,
is absolutely terrific. She is so completely glammed down that, while her
picture on the box cover was clearly her, I didn't recognize her at all as
Pauline. She's small and slouchy, totally embodying the role of the school's
biggest reject. The typical thing would have been for the character to try and
do something to fit in, Pauline embraces her misfit state and does all she can
to make her classmates miserable.

She gets to vamp it up in her head, though, during dream sequences that
remind me of a cross between The Cell and Alejandro Jodorowski's The Holy Mountain. They're cold,
antiseptic, bloody, and sexual, reinforcing Pauline's hospital fetish and her
mind takes all that a long way. Here, she's huge and glamorous, the queen of her
environment. The stark contrast between this and her waking life sells the
delusion really well.

Hers isn't the only quality performance, though. With a cast that also
includes John Waters (Seed of
Chucky), Ray Wise (Twin Peaks),
Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork
Orange), and Marlee Matlin (Children of a Lesser God), there's plenty
to work with here and, while their parts aren't terribly huge, they are all fun
additions to the film.

Excision works as a gore-soaked comedy and a coming-of-age drama.
While it seems like there might a little too much going on to be effective, the
combination works well and, at a mere eighty minutes, it never outstays its
welcome. It's consistent fun with a lot of style and a mean, funny spirit that's
highly appealing to me and which I'll certainly watch again.

The Blu-ray for Excision comes from Anchor Bay in a solid release.
The 2.35:1/1080p transfer is quite good, with no transfer errors to speak of,
nicely saturated colors, and deep black levels. There is a good contrast between
real life and the dream sequences, with the former having a nice realistic
quality and the later almost fantastically garish and bright. The sound is
equally as good, with a nice TrueHD surround mix that totally gets the job done.
There is good separation in all the channels, with strong clarity in both the
music and dialog for an overall strong disc.

The only extra is an audio commentary with Bates and McCord, but it's
surprisingly well done. While it's a standard production commentary, they get
into a few interesting discussions about blocking, production design, and other
very technical details about the film, which is not what I expect from actor
commentaries and I was pleasantly surprised.

Closing Statement

I didn't know what I expected out of Excision and nor am I sure what I
wound up getting, but I know that I am very impressed with the results. The
eclectic cast and AnnaLynn McCord's terrific performance are the real selling
point of the film, but the excessive blood and strangely dark sense of humor
take it over the top. It's not going to be for everybody; it's too strange for
that. But its honesty and visual impressiveness make it a bloody piece of solid
entertainment that should easily achieve a deserved cult status.